Posted: 10/8/2008 12:03:13 PM EDT
| I'm not all together on what constitutes a good ground even at my house. But I gotta ask, when you are doing a remote station, (like your box, arjedi) what do you do for the station's ground? I can't imagine that everyone pounds an 8 ft conductor in the ground, that would be beyond a pain in the ass to remove...... |
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If you are running a random wire type of antenna, then the tuner needs an RF ground to "work against" (technical term) to create a "balance" in the antenna sys. If using a vertical ant., then wires/mesh placed at the base of the antenna and connected to the ground/coax shield side provide the RF ground. Lightning grounds are different from RF grounds, and unless I'm setting up portable ops for 2 or more days, I don't drive a ground rod for lightning protection. ETA-- even for longer ops I use a short rod, about 3 feet and am lucky to drive it in 2 feet till I run into rocks. I try to keep the soil/sand wet around the rod. I hope it will never be "tested" but it does seem to keep the reciever a bit quieter. |
To elaborate a little bit, when using a random or long wire antenna, it's customary to run a second wire along the ground directly below the wire antenna, approximately the same length as the wire antenna. One end of this "RF counterpoise" is usually connected to the ground connection on the antenna tuner. It serves as an artificial ground for the antenna, mimicking the electrical behavior of the earth under a well-grounded antenna. |
+1 |
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How about for a portable generator? Do you put a ground rod in? I remember in the army we had ground rods that were threaded so that you could put two or three together to get an 8 foot rod for the gen set. I haven't been able to find anything like that now. I've been thinking of cutting an 8 foot ground rod in half and then pounding the two halves in so that they form an inverted V and connecting the generator's ground to both of the rods. I would drive them in at an angle to try to keep them in the softer soil near the surface and to make it easy to pull out with the truck. |